Sophie Ponthieux

Chapter 12 - Gender Inequality

The chapter examines how the various dimensions of economic inequality between men and women are analyzed today. Beyond the gender wage gap—a central issue—and of course the still far from equal sharing of housework, the chapter also reviews research on gender inequality in access to self-employment, the gender gap in pensions, and the emerging topic of a gender gap in wealth, attempting to highlight the paths between the various facets of gender inequality. Throughout the review, much attention is paid to measurement issues, the scope of empirical evidence, and to limitations due either to the small number of large and comparable data sets or to conventional approaches that limit the possibilities to compare men and women.

Neural Classification and ``Traditional'' Data Analysis: An Application to Households' Living Conditions

The description, classification and « measurement » of living conditions present many difficulties. A very important one comes from the qualitative nature of the data, and the large number of characteristics that may be taken into account. For this reason, it is difficult to obtain a description that could give an overall view of the arrangements between the modalities, and be usable to breakdown the observations into a reasonable number of classes. In this paper, we propose several examples of the use of neural network techniques, precisely the Kohonen algorithm, to classify a population of households according to their characteristics in terms of living conditions.

Bajos salarios y trabajadores pobres: una comparación entre Francia y Estados Unidos.

En Estados Unidos la parte de asalariados con bajos salarios en el conjunto de la mano de obra es dos veces superior que en Francia; aunque ha permanecido relativamente constante en el otro lado del Atlantico, mientras crecia en Francia. Las caracteristicas de los trabajadores afectados en ambos paises son comparables: las mujeres, los jovenes y los menos cualificados se ven mas que proporcionalmente afectados; son grupos que tambien se encuentran con mayor frecuencia entre los trabajos a tiempo parcial. Los asalariados con bajos salarios tiene un riesgo mayor que la media de los asalariados de vivir en un hogar de baja renta. En Estados Unidos los pobres en edad de trabajar tiene mayor probabilidad de ser empleados que en el caso frances. En ambos paises hay un vinculo claro entre el riesgo de pobreza y el numero anual de horas prestadas. Sin embargo, en Francia los trabajadores activos pobres son mas susceptibles de tener que enfrentarse con el problema de horarios de trabajo semanal inadecuados, mientras que el mismo fenomeno en los Estados Unidos se debe claramente al bajo nivel del salario minimo.

Low pay and poor workers: a comparative study of France and the United States

In the USA the share of low-wage earners in the labour force is twice as high as in France, although it has remained relatively constant on the other side of the Atlantic in recent years, whereas it has risen in France. The characteristics of the workers affected in the two countries are comparable: women, young people and the low-skilled are more than proportionately affected, groups that are also more frequently encountered in part-time jobs. Low-wage earners have a higher risk of living in a low-income household than the average for wage and salary earners. In the USA poor people of working age are more likely to be employed than is the case in France. In both countries there is clearly a link between the poverty risk and the annual number of hours worked. However, in France the working poor are more likely to be confronted with the problem of inadequate weekly working hours, whereas the same phenomenon in the USA is clearly due to the low level of minimum wages.